\t\t\t\tA small bubble in glass or on water.<\/p>\n
\n“Bubbles?”<\/p>\n
Puzzled pause.<\/p>\n
“Bubbles?”<\/p>\n
“Yeah. Bubbles.”<\/p>\n
This was the substance of a conversation between myself and a grade school friend as I attempted to describe to him the sensation brewing in my digestive system when I was nervous or experiencing anxiety. <\/p>\n
In fact this sensation was virtually constant.<\/p>\n
I might further have explicated the slight clenching feeling that turned in my stomach, a sensation others might describe as “that sinking feeling” portending some bad omen. <\/p>\n
It was the bubbles, though, that perplexed my friend, and which seemed to require elaboration on my part. <\/p>\n
Instead of expounding on the nuances of the bubbles I think I gave up on the topic, which I introduced to explain the back-story behind my status as the throw-up king throughout much of grade school. <\/p>\n
The chief culprit behind my seemingly routine barf episodes, I thought, was a digestive tract sensitively tied to my nervous worries, the word “nervous” used not in its clich\u00e9 sense of ego self-preservation but in the sense of involuntary bodily and mental tics arising in response to earthly matters of unnatural conceit.<\/p>\n
The spontaneous vomiting I experienced through school has largely eased as an adult. I can, however, reliably expect to feel that clenching feeling of bubbles in my gut during and after an oft-repeated dream. In this dream I never graduated from college and had to go back to school (nearly 20 years later) to get my degree. In some of these dreams it seems I never even left school, and had been endlessly pursuing a college degree from 1986 to the present.<\/p>\n
That dream is based in genuine anxieties I experienced as my college graduation approached in 1990 and it appeared I might not make it out in 4 years. I did graduate in 4 years through the magic of a crafty (and perfectly legitimate) sleight-of-hand called “retroactive credit.” I invoked this trick to bump up some credits on my transcript, and after telling a few friends about it it seemed like everyone was doing it. In fact I’d say quite a number of people in my class who might have otherwise not graduated that year did so after learning about the retroactive credit loophole.<\/p>\n
In retrospect it seems the stakes were nowhere near as high as I imagined them at the time. If I came up 2 credits short I would probably have been allowed to be part of the graduation ceremony, though my diploma folder would be empty until I finished a couple of courses either at the school or elsewhere.<\/p>\n
It often takes me hours to snap out of that dream after I wake. A half day might pass before I stand up in my mind and announce that it can’t be real, and that I do not have to return to school. <\/p>\n
I would think that type of anxiety dream is common enough, but its vividness makes an hours-long impression on my wakened mind, renewing the turgid, bubbling gut-churn that has mostly vanished into my adulthood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A small bubble in glass or on water.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whats-the-word","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/saumAn-bleb","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}